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How to determine minimal extent size ?

Hello,

I have 40 Kilobytes as an extent size in my tablespaces. Now I read the following text on this page.

Having 1,000 extents for an object by itself does not pose any performance problems, so long as the extents are sized as a multiple of (DB_FILE_MULTIBLOCK_READ_COUNT * DB_BLOCK_SIZE). The aforementioned formula is relevant for full-table scans or index fast full scans and not for single-block index scans. If the extent sizes adhere to the above formula, it ensures that Oracle will issue the same number of read system calls regardless of whether the object has 1 extent or 1,000 extents. If the extents are not aligned with the aforementioned size, additional read system calls can cause unnecessary overhead on the I/O sub-system. In the bigger scheme of things, assuming worst-case scenario, go ahead and add one additional read system call per extent per heavily hit table/index in your database. If you have many hundreds of objects with 1000s of misaligned extents, it will create overhead on the I/O sub-system.

the reason for the "extent size should be multiple of (block size*db_file_multiblock_read_count)" statement is that when oracle and the o/s combine to read large chunks of data, the number of bytes that will be read in a single operation will be the minimum of ...

So, in your case you have block size*db_file_multiblock_read_count = 1Mb (which maybe misleadingly high -- your o/s might not support a 1Mb iu/o operation). If you have a table of 2Mb you could potentially scan it in 2 i/o operations (provided the o/s will do so, of course). However if that table is divided into extents of 40kb then each i/o operation will be limited to 40kb, and it will take "25.6" (ie. 26) i/o operations to scan the table.

If you have tables that fit within a single 40kb extent then that's ok -- you'll get your single i/o to scan the entire table, but a full scan of a multi-extent table with extent size that is not an integer multiple of 1Mb (or whatever the maximum allowed by the o/s is) will suffer.